Eruditorum Presscast: Alex Reed (Neoreaction a Basilisk 5)

To round out the series of podcasts promoting Neoreaction a Basilisk (alltogether now, currently available on Kickstarter) I am thrilled to finally have Alex Reed on the Eruditorum Presscast. Alex, of course, is the primary architect of Seeming, and so in one sense has been on every Eruditorum Presscast, since our theme music is of course "Worldburners Unite," previously described as "a protest song as imagined by Thomas Ligotti. That's available here for your listening pleasure.

We remain on that exciting/stressful bubble where we could well make the last stretch goal if the weekend goes well, but it's in no way certain. So I figured I'd talk a bit about the most expensive edition (well, aside from the original plates, which have been snapped up), the Sigil Edition. I've not actually mocked one of these up yet (I'm not acquiring the printer I'll need until after the move), but I've got the next best thing as an image here, namely a photo of the audio edition of Unearthing, which came with a transcript of the piece printed in the same style I'll be using. I'd completely forgotten this was a thing when I came up with the Sigil Edition months ago, and didn't remember until I was watching the film version of Unearthing and its existence came flooding back. Which was funny.

The reason this seemed like a fun way to do the high-end edition of the book was that it seemed like it encapsulated the sort of "dispatches from a madman" vibe that the Conspiracy Zine edition had, only moreso. (That's much of why Moore/Jenkins did it, I think - the same sort of "weird transmission from the outside" vibe that nearly led them to release the film version exclusively on VHS, and that's implied by the very silly "private and confidential" tag on the envelope.) But it needed something a little bit extra to make it special, and so I merged it with another idea that had been kicking around, namely distributing a bunch of sigils to various people and letting them decide if they wanted to launch them.

Right now I've got eleven of them to make, and a nice text document where I'm jotting down possible purposes for the sigils. (The only one I know for sure, as I've said before, is "destroy capitalism.") I'll draw the sigil on the back of the first page (so it'll be at the top of the stack when it's all folded) along with a signature, and then package the whole thing in an envelope to keep it safe, with a print-off of the cover on the outside of the envelope.

I really like this idea - a distributed magical ritual, the goals of the book encapsulated in a small and finite set of copies, sent out into the world and put in the readers' hands so they can decide what to do with it. Which is, of course, how books always work.